[matt-attack]

Maybe they resisted because it was completely ridiculous waste of engineering resources all over the country and for absolutely no tangible reason other than white people trying to feel better about themselves.

I work in the field of film mastering (with countless product names with the word “master” in it) and luckily no one got the ridiculous idea in their head that we need to change this lingo.

Show me a single person who has a valid reason for me not calling my branch “master” or my bedroom “the master”. I honestly think this sort of ridiculing word policing is why we lost this last damned election. And if you’re somehow proud that you’ve renamed your git branches, you’re very likely a contributor to that lost election.

[AdhemarVandamme]

In Microsoft v. AT&T, decision 550 US 437 (2007), there was discussion about a golden disk, and the terminology changed to master disk during the course of the proceedings, because the disk wasn’t actually made of gold.

I remember that Justice Antonin Scalia objected: “I hope we can continue calling it the golden disk. It has a certain Scheherazade quality that really adds a lot of interest to this case.”

<https://www.supremecourt.gov/oral_arguments/argument_transcr...>

[em-bee]

what, the golden ratio is not made of gold? have we been betrayed all this time?

[Gibbon1]

This stuff reminds me of what my mother said about feminists trying to get people to spell women with a y. She didn't like it because it made feminism seem like something petty and frivolous.

If I put my tin foil hat on it feels like a psyops to make the left look like a bunch of morons.

[fuckinpuppers]

Yeah, I mean, isn’t a masters degree even worse, then?

[kread]

Now I just know why I couldn't get a job. It's because I got a bad and worse degree for two years

[em-bee]

a masters degree is about mastery, not about being central/main/leading...

[patchymcnoodles]

That "waste" of resources was absolutely tiny. Took me just some minutes. And I didn't do it because of DEI, just because I think it's a better name.

[kstrauser]

Same for me, but kind of because of DEI. Basically, it offended some people, and even if I thought it was a little overblown, it took about 2 minutes to change the default name of future repos to be something else (which was at least as good, and perhaps better). It made some people happier at approximately zero cost to myself, so why not.

[bulbar]

I have encountered at least two bugs due to the change in names.

Everything considered I invested an hour or more in total. I am pretty sure decades of engineering time and resources were invested over the years because some people didn't like a default globally used for decades.

[fastasucan]

I dont know, for me main makes more sense so I prefer main. The main branch isn't master of anything, but its the main branch.

[thunky]

> The main branch isn't master of anything

It's master as in "master copy":

A "master copy" is an original version of a work from which other copies are made, serving as the definitive or controlling version

[atoav]

I actually worked in film audio engineering and Master is not the universally used term and hasn't been used uniformly throughout history. I have an analog Mackie mixer from the 2000s with "Main" as the name of the Main Bus that was designed before the whole debate took part.

As far as software goes, things are similar. The process of "Mastering" is an exception.

As far as git branches go, I am fine with main. It has two advantages over master aside from any culturual questions:

1. main is more self-explanatory for beginners who don't know how "master" was/is used in tech.

2. it is shorter. While two letters don't make a huge difference, that is still a subtile advantage.

Whether these two points alone are enough to justify the needed work (which is probably not a lot to be honest), IDK.

[dzhiurgis]

Makes sense when you release 3.0 and basically allowed to introduce breaking changes.

In tech field there's lots of people living on the very fringes of society, hidden away behind keyboard.

[p0w3n3d]

Every time I push to master I get this song in my head

  Master! Master! 

Every time I push to main I have in my head:

  ...meh

[weebull]

Master of Puppets -- Metallica

To be fair, the song is about control and the abuse of power.

[lucyjojo]

you can call your branch whatever name you want. nobody cares, nobody is stopping you.

[xedrac]

That was true before the 3.0 release. Why didn't the people offended by "master" just change the branch name? Because it was never about their own branch names. It was about everyone else's.

[StopDisinfo910]

> Maybe they resisted because it was completely ridiculous waste of engineering resources all over the country and for absolutely no tangible reason other than white people trying to feel better about themselves.

I think the resisting probably wasted more time than anything else.

We used the occasion to ensure that there was no hardcoded naming in our IaC, internal tooling and CI/CD. It was surprinsingly easy, gave us a great excuse to do some much needed clean up and now everything can work with any branch used as the main one.

Was it extremely important? Probably not. Was it worth fighting against/having a stong opinion about? Probably not either.

Sometimes, it's easier to just go with the flow and try to turn things which seem meaningless into actual improvements. If it makes the people who think it's not meaningless feel better, well, even better. It surely didn't cost me much.

[input_sh]

That "waste of resources" is completely made up, this changes nothing for any existing repo what so ever. Any existing repo that updated did so completely voluntarily, no tool forced them to.

At most you could argue that you needed to run one additional command when pushing the initial commit during this transitional period where GitLab/GitHub had updated the name but Git itself has not. Therefore, now we're back to square one with less "waste" as you put it.